Cindy Esposito, COO and Co-Founder of 3BL Media, posed a great question at Justmeans group on LinkedIn.
Can Innovation Lead Us to Growth (and Happiness) Without Consumption?
My response:
Actually, we need to redefine growth. There are three forms in living systems. The first is expansion, growth that cannot continue throughout a whole life without dire consequences. Children expand in height and width for many years and then they stop. If they don’t, we consider them to be having problems.
The second and third forms are ways that living systems grow without ceasing. Extension is movement into new arenas and creation of new contributions. Our physical body stops expanding but it continues to develop, from learning to walk to participating in triathlons and all kinds of movement in between. That is growth in capability through extension of current form. Evolution is movement beyond our current form or capabilities into new places and possibilities. We let go of some of our previous forms and ideas and step into new contexts and systems. Living systems, including humans and businesses, experience and express all three forms of growth.
We must continue to grow to be happy, but adding more in the physical world, in living systems terms, stops when we have reached a saturation of form. We need to decouple growth in business from the lower, more primal forms of expansion, otherwise we will experience problems. That is how life works. At the same time, if we don’t enhance and build extension and evolution we never get to a place where consumption is experienced as saturated. Good athletes don’t want to grow taller and heavier indefinitely—only until the time arrives for new forms of growth in capability and possibility.
Find more about ideas of appropriate growth in my book, The Responsible Business: Reimaging Sustainability and Success, recently published by Jossey Bass and a CNBC Best Biz Read for 2011.